Our good book sponsor, O'Reilly is pushing their Ignite concept one step further this year and making a Global Ignite Week from March 1st to 5th. In short, it's an opportunity to share your ideas over a beer, and send the word out through your network with a 5 minutes presentation made of 20 slides (15 seconds per slides moving automatically). Watching this video of what Ignite is (youtube link for people outside of China) is definitely worth 5 minutes of your time. So O'Reilly China is helping you to get your word out in Beijing and you find out all the details and register here. Definitely something to mark down on your calendar!

Following up on building a Hackerspace in Beijing after last month presentation we have been moving forward with the plan. Since then Jean has started a Hackerspace Group in the BLUG and a few members have been discussing in the forum to put ideas together like budgeting and location. Clone, a geeky talented architect even stepped forward and is willing to contribute on the design of the hackerspace. In order to establish our budgeting, we need your input: there is now a poll on the left side of the page for interested members to vote! To make the Hackerspace happening in Beijing, please participate and let us know how much you would be willing to contribute and which kind of membership (monthly, bi-yearly or yearly) suits you better!

As a co-organzer of GNOME.Asia Summit 2008 in Beijing, BLUG had been having an active roll in the GNOME.Asia Summit 2009 in HoChiMinh City, Vietnam as well. Right now, the GNOME.Asia Commitee is calling for potential host of the Summit this year. Interested community (anywhere in Asia) just need to send a proposal to the committee before end of March. Please feel free to click "read more" to view the whole announcement. Thanks for passing the message along!

BLUG, member of China Open Source Promotion Union (COPU) for a few years now, was invited to join and participate in the 3rd General Assembly for the first time on January 28, 2010. The great revelation for us bluggers is that we had now been selected to become an Executive Member on COPU's board. After a quick vote from the existing board members we got approved together with another group of about 10 companies. COPU's board is now made of 51 executive members, and BLUG is the only FOSS Community appointed! Other members are Government departments, Open Source companies and universities. We want to extend our thanks to both COPU board members for acknowledging our contributions to the Chinese Open Source landscape and our members for making us stronger over the years! Seems a bottle of Champagne is in order to celebrate (local Yanjing champagne of course)...